Registrar, The University of Nottingham

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We recently covered here a few of the bigger international rankings just out (plus one from Uzbekistan) so thought it was time to make sure everyone knew about a few league tables which might have been overlooked.

Money, money, money

In similar vein, those financially minded people over at TotallyMoney developed a ranking which looks at the weekly rent of university halls, cinema ticket price, monthly gym membership cost, cappuccino cost, meal cost, the price of a pint at Wetherspoon, the cost of a doner kebab and the price of a cab from the town centre to the university.

The top 20 looks like this (the cheapest offers across the country are highlighted in green):

Night time economies

Every student understands just how important a night out can be when it comes to your overall university experience. Whether you have already enjoyed the definitive graduate-hat -throw or you are currently at the stage of weighing up your studying options, there’s no questioning that the social aspect can often be a deal-breaker. After all, freshers can be the gateway to making friends and memories which will last forever.
We’ve looked at various factors that make up a memorable (or not so much!) night out and ranked the top university towns and cities. Check out our index below to see where your uni ranks. While there may be more important academic factors to consider when deciding what is your ideal studying city is, it can’t hurt to know just how much of a good night out you could have. Bottoms up!

There are some rather different prices here though. And the data on numbers of nightlife options and the number of takeaways looks a little flaky to say the least. But what the heck, bottoms up it is.

Do you feel lucky punk?

And fortunately we have this work of sheer genius to finish us off. It is the quite remarkable Fortunate 500 rankings. Here is the rather surprising world Top 10 which has some interesting entrants:

The methodology gives a clear sense of the approach of this league table:

Ensuring that our measurements are fair and unbiased means randomizing our results. Some of our techniques include:
1. Tortoise racing: we write the names of our institutions on the back of tortoises and race them. With the exponential growth in some institutions, though, we are running out of tortoises.
2. Binary Growth Observation (also known as BINGO): We “borrowed” a BINGO machine from a local retirement center. We then wrote the names of academic institutions on the balls, and the order in which they come out is the order in which we rank them (the first out of the machine is the best, last is the worst).
3. Numerical Algorithm Generator: our most sophisticated of analytic tools, this is an app one of our interns had on their smartphone. We can enter any word, and this impressive app sorts it out into a random number ranking with the press of a button. It’s as scientifically valid as any other system (and its made our intern very happy to have invested last month’s entire paycheck in the latest smartphone).

And here is the UK ranking (although it is not entirely clear which particular measurements have been adopted here):

The authors conclude by suggesting that luck is one of the most robust predictors of academic reputation and learning outcomes and indeed is highly correlated with the appearance of a university in one of the major world rankings. It’s hard to argue with that. Get lucky folks!